I've got strong memories of playing fantasy games like Lords Of Midnight and The Hobbit on C64 as a kid. In those days, the game realms consisted of text and rudimentary graphics and, like novels, were brought to life in your imagination. Today, however, the equivalents of Lords Of Midnight are games like World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars. They don’t exercise your imagination in the same way, but they do offer astonishingly elaborate realities to take up residence in.
World Of Warcraft, for example, offers not just a huge world to explore, it also allows you to develop the skills of your character, which can become involved with complex in-game communities and economies. My main WOW character has reached 60, the cap level in the game. In some ways, it's a frustrating position to be in as high-level questing is extremely time-demanding and difficult to orchestrate. But I’m able to undertake the alternative activity of working on my trade skills and trying to use them to turn a profit. In my case that means taking Tauren, my bovine, on jaunts to regions of the world where certain herbs grow. I then harvest them - taking care of the local flora of course - and use my alchemical skills to produce potions with a variety of attributes. The potions can be sold in the game's auction houses or shared among team-mates.
World Of Warcraft
Where contemporary massively multiplayer role-playing games really excel is in this sense of involvement with their worlds and your identification with your characters. They become companions for literally hundreds of hours while you level them and their skills up. Console gaming just can't compete with this, with these enormous thriving virtual worlds, which can also evolve through patching (alterations to the game itself, such as the recent addition of player versus player battlegrounds to WOW).
It’s possible that next generation console gaming may see more patching and adding of new content to games - it's something we've seen lately on Halo 2 for example - but it's doubtful that consoles will ever be able to compete with the sheer variety and flexibility of PC gaming. It can also involve a high level of personalization, not just through the fact that every avatar in a MMORPG is unique, but also through the actual technicalities of modifying your game setup.
Guild Wars and Halo 2
Twenty or 30 hours in the company of Link or Leon can be very special, but there's something truly remarkable about PC MMORPG gaming. It's something that's not just shocking to someone who grew up with the more hermetic game environments of C64, old-school arcade games and consoles, but also because it's just so darned sci-fi to find yourself living alternate fictional lives in such elaborate virtual worlds.